2.09.2016

Not Your Typical Makeup Tutorial

Spoken word video by Theanne Liu: for those who refuse to be silenced.

This video starts off like one of the ubiquitous makeup tutorials that populate YouTube... but then it becomes something different. Theanne Liu created this thoughtful spoken word piece to share about her personal experiences within Asian America -- "through learning about our history, understanding how we are racialized subjects, being in the diaspora, to dealing with various forms of racism and ethnosexualization."

Created for her Asian American Studies class on Race, Gender, and Sexuality at Northwestern University, the video is produced in the style of a makeup tutorial as a nod to the hypervisibility of Asian women on YouTube in the realm of beauty and fashion, while remaining underrepresented in other non-beauty-related video content.

Take a look:

Theanne admits that she herself is an avid subscriber to many Asian American beauty vloggers, but she was inspired to create a video that explored a more nuanced representation of typical Asian American femininity.

Here's the text from her piece:

RED LIPS EVENING MAKEUP TUTORIAL: for those who refuse to be silenced

step 1: primer

start off with a primer which provides a base-

history of why these Chinese and Taiwanese features

are only read as “Asian”

faces foreign, facing racism

caricatures of 20th century immigrant bodies

excluded, massacred, detained

until we were considered desirable for our brains

intellect weaponized

to uphold the model minority myth

as the basis

of how Asian America

is supposed to appear

step 2: foundation

when you choose a foundation

so you forget about how your darker predecessors

fought for your place in America

and still how they die because this world sees brownness and blackness